Advancements in computer architecture and digital networks over the past several decades have revolutionized marketing technology. For example, Google AdWords digital ad campaigns are commonly used by both small and large companies as an online advertising service that helps marketers reach their customers instantly. The advertisers pay to display brief advertising copy, product listings, and video content within the Google ad network to web users and targeted customers. Today, there is a wide variety of different cloud-based services (e.g., Google AdWords, Salesforce, Marketo, Cordial, DoubleClick, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media) that generate large campaign forecast data streams for ecommerce businesses.
In the next few years it is estimated that marketing spending will exceed $600 billion dollars, with a large share of that amount going to cloud-based marketing services. Large organizations and businesses have migrated to a robust set of marketing technology tools that are delivered over the Internet. These marketing tools generate a large amount of their own campaign data. It has become difficult to collect all of the marketing data for a particular customer or campaign which has been generated from many different cloud-based services, combine all of the cost, revenue, lead generation, etc., information results from all of the advertising activity, and present it to the customer in an insightful, easily comprehensible way.
As a result, marketing directors and CEOs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on digital marketing programs without getting meaningful, quantifiable data on a granular level about which campaigns actually succeed. By way of example, even small companies that are set up for Google AdWords and Facebook ads may spend several million dollars on many thousands of different individual Google AdWords and Facebook ads without knowing which individual ads work and which do not. In other words, any one digital marketing ad campaign could be wasting large amounts of revenue, or generating huge returns without the company being aware of it.